Shoot! I am sorry you ran into that bug. I thought I had completely ironed it out, but of course, fixing bugs never ends!
The "one-life" approach was something that we decided early on for the game-jam this was entered into. We have plans in the future for a version with different difficulties, so the checkpoints would be incorporated there! For the hardest mode though, we would still keep it to one life.
Thanks for playing though, hopefully you will have less of a headache with the "remaster". :)